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the very persons against whom those worthles rebelled;-but as it was, they testified their respect by the hands of the hangman! But he proceeds to give what he calls proofs of the position, that the princes of the House of Brunswick are at heart Jacobites.

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The first is, that Frederick, Prince of Wales, rebuked his wife for throwing some blame upon the lady who harboured the Pretender when he flung himself upon her protection in the extremity of peril.' I hope in God,' said his Royal Highness, you would have done so in the same circumstances. Now, to what does this amount, but that even Frederick, perhaps the least magnanimous of all the Brunswick princes, yet felt what every human being must feel on such an occasion, without entering in the least into the merits of the question out of which it arose? We know that the law calls it treason to shelter a traitor; but the man who most abhors the crime, would feel himself almost as unable to resist the sympathy which overwhelmed him, when he suddenly found a fellow-creature's life in his hands, as to perform the last office of the law upon him. This is all that Frederick meant; and we rather marvel that the partialities of his august spouse for a nobleman of known jacobite tendencies, were not rather cited as evidence that the late king took his jacobitism by descent. However, the author goes on to prove his late Majesty also an adherent of the Stuart family, in preference to the Hanoverian. Not only did he restore the forfeited estates, and afford relief in money to the distresses of the exiled house, (why was the restoration of the national dress also omitted?) but Mr Hogg adds, that since his Majesty is now secluded from his government and people, and we may consider him as a deceased monarch,' he will relate a trait which marked his sentiments of those who stood for the cause of his unfortunate relative:' We proceed to give this notable trait in the author's own words-premising, that we verily believe neither he nor any man living would have ventured to publish such a thing, had not the late king been, as he says, in the state of a deceased monarch. 'His Majesty having been told of a gentleman of family and fortune in Perthshire, who had not only refused to take the oath of allegiance to him, but had never permitted him (the king) to be named as king in his presence. Carry my compliments to him,' said the king, but-what-stop-no;-he may perhaps not receive my compliments as King of England-give him the Elector of Hanover's compliments, and tell him that he respects the steadiness of his principles.' Now, we will at once take upon us to affirm, from internal evidence, that

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every one word of this is a pure fabrication, probably of some one who wished to impose on Mr Hogg's credulity. The late King was no more the man to utter such affected stuff, than Mr Pitt was the man to die with Oh my country!'* in his mouth, even if he had been at the moment in a state of mind to speak coherently. His Majesty was a plain, rational person, utterly incapable of such nonsense. The folly of it was as much beneath his good sense, as its conceit was beyond his ingenuity. If any person could have ventured to tell him the anecdote on which the tale is founded, it must have been in or der to laugh in broad grins at the Highlander to whom it related. If the monarch had taken it at all seriously, he would have begun by showing his displeasure at the rash narrator, That he should send his compliments, or, in Mr Hogg's words, desire his compliments to be given, implies he must have forgotten both the purity of his language, and the etiquette of his station. But the kind of message-the vile buffoonery and clumsy conceit of it-really evinces a degree of vulgarity and affectation in the inventor which can only be equalled by the profound ignorance which it shows of the King's taste and cha

racter.

Not content with this, however, our author must needs put into the mouth of his present Majesty, a speech, which, if not so absurd, is quite in the same taste, and, we will venture to assert, quite as credible as the former. 'He was heard (it seems) to express himself one day before a dozen of gentlemen of both nations, with the greatest warmth as follows."I have always regarded the attachment of the Scots to the "Pretender-I beg your pardon, gentlemen-to prince Charles "Stuart I mean-as a lesson to me whom to trust in the hour ❝ of need." Really this is too much. Mr Hogg must have been either grossly gulled, or he has exercised his own fancy. When did any one-much less any one of a family remarkable for knowledge of etiquette, even beyond other royal personages-ever talk of Prince Charles Stuart? We shall next hear, we suppose, of Duke Frederick Guelph. These are not trifles-they demonstrate that some one's fancy has been at work; and, to the eye of a person who knows such matters, they do as incontestably disclose the hand of the fabricator, as false Scotch would betray to a countryman of Mr Hogg, the imposture of any one who should put into his mouth bad verses fabricated in

* We presume the reader is aware, that all Mr Pitt's friends deny this tale, which some one palmed upon Mr Rose. Indeed it refutes itself.

London. But the present king is charged with a greater indecorum in one respect, than even that imputed to his venerable parent. Why, we desire to know, should he trust those who pertinaciously resisted, endeavoured to destroy, and continued successfully to ridicule his whole family, rather than those who uniformly defended them, and whose attachment was at least as steady, though somewhat more successful, than the hostility of the other party? The King, we again assert, is incapable of such a low species of flattery; and one in which the part is so clumsily overdone, as to apologize to a dozen gentlemen of both nations' for using the ordinary word Pretender. That he should ever have happened in his whole life to be in such a society (partly English, too, be it observed) as should not make the speech in question a most fulsome and inappropriate compliment, we think quite beyond all probability. After such specimens as those we have now given, the reader will wonder the less at Mr Hogg's concluding, by making the whole family Jacobites in direct terms. This feat he performs in the following fashion.

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Captain Stuart of Invernahoyle's singular remark was not, it seems, quite without foundation. A gentleman, in a large company, gibed him for holding the king's commission, while, at the same time, he was a professed Jacobite. "So I well may, " answered he, "in imitation of my master: the king himself is a Jacobite." The gentleman shook his head, and remarked, that the thing was impossible. "By G―, said Stuart," but I tell you he is, and every son that he has. There is not one of them who (if he had lived in my brave father's days) would not to a certainty have been hanged. pp. x. xi.

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We can excuse the simplicity-the bon-hommie, to use a word not easily translated-which could make this good old Centurion swallow and retail such nonsense. But Mr Hogg's silliness is of a more dull cast; and it is mixed up with such practical heresies as these- Now, when the horrors of the Catholic • religion have ceased to oppress the minds of men, there is but of thinking on the rights of the Stuarts throughout the realm.' Whereby he means, if the passage has any sense at all, that the only objection to the family was their religion, or rather the hatred unreasonably felt of it in England, and that their right would now be universally admitted if they were still in the field. Truly this writer knows little of either the past or present state of the country.-Do the despotic principles of the Stuarts go for nothing? Did he never hear of the statutes which proclaim the political delinquencies of the Stuarts, and the Liturgy, in which all England still returns thanks for being secured from arbitrary power as well as from Popery?

But to argue with such writers is waste of time; we only notice their follies, because a fashion seems of late to have been springing up of treating the grievous and unpardonable faults of the Stuarts more gently than is consistent with a due sense of the obligations we owe to the great men who drove them from the country which they had misgoverned. Mr Hogg carries this a step further, and helps to cast imputations on the memory of those founders of a liberty which he either cannot appreciate, because his principles are slavish, or sets little account upon, because its history-its adventures-will not serve to work up into middling poems, and Tales' calculated to lengthen and sadden a Winter's Evening.'

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The plan of this work, its politicks apart, is an extremely laudable one. Many of the Jacobite Songs are worthy of a better cause; and, indeed, its romantic features were far from being ill adapted to poetry. Certain it is, that if the sound principles lay entirely on one side, the good poetry was exclusively the lot of the other; and more tame and spiritless productions cannot well be conceived than those of the Whig bards, whose effusions have been subjoined by Mr Hogg to his Jacobite Relics, for the purpose, it should seem, of showing their inferiority, rather than with the candid intention of hearing both sides. It is not pronouncing too harsh a sentence on these to affirm, that they rise but little above the average merit of the collections frequently made of the squibs in use at contested Elections among our English neighbours-from whose pens, indeed, our national partialities are somewhat soothed to find that all those rhymes have proceeded. Of all the Whig songs,' says the editor, there is not one that I can trace to be of Scottish • original.

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The Jacobite muse is very differently endowed; though we will confess that her warblings have somewhat disappointed us. Not that we deny the merit of many of them; but because the proportion of insipid, middling, and positively bad is far greater than we had expected. This may no doubt be owing to the compiler's taste, which is evidently of a coarse and vulgar description. He has certainly had the means of discovering all the relics of value which exist; and few have probably perished in the short period that has elapsed since they were composed. Voluminous collections were open to his researches in the hands of all good Jacobites: Besides innumerable contributors of detached songs, he mentions eleven of those stores; and, at length, they poured in upon him so profusely that he actually grew terrified when he heard of a MS. volume.' It adds greatly to the value of the collection, that the musick of each air is

given; and copious notes are subjoined, containing remarks and extracts the former not always very happy or very elegant-the latter generally from books in common use; but, upon the whole, conveying a great deal of the information requisite to illustrate the text. These notes are, in bulk, exactly equal to the text; and the Appendix, beside the Whig effusions already mentioned, gives a number of Jacobite songs, the airs of which he could not discover. This class is inferior in merit, generally speaking, to the other, and comprises several English

songs.

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The first song in the volume is that famous one, The King shall enjoy his own again,' which is said to have produced such marvellous effects in favour of the Royal cause during half of the seventeenth century,-and, during a great part of the eighteenth, to have animated their falling hopes. It is altogether English, and possesses no kind of poetical merit. Probably the words of the burthen, and the air, may have been the cause of its success. In the notes upon it, Mr Hogg makes mention of a Dr Walker who happened to be overseer of the market at Ipswich in Suf6 folk, on account of giving false evidence at an assize held there.' (p. 155.) In other words, he stood in the pillory for perjury. Now, if Mr Hogg thinks to make himself popular by imitating some of the bad and bald jokes of Walter Scott's notes, we must whisper to him that it was in spite, and not in consequence, of such things that the Minstrel's fame waxed great. The third and fourth songs are in ridicule and vituperation of Leslie's Marches-to Scotland and to Marston Moor. Of the former, Mr Hogg says, It is the most perfect thing of the kind to be found in that or any other age; and, wild as some of the expressions are, must be viewed as a great curiosity. It is the very essence of sarcasm and derision, and possesses a spirit and energy for which we may look in vain in any other song existing.' Sure we are, these remarks are any thing rather than either perfect, or spirited, or even a curiosity-except it be for containing at once a specimen of the bathos and the hyperbole. A good notion of the taste of the editor may however be gathered from it. We therefore subjoin two verses of the piece he thus extols-premising that the second is so much coarser than even these, as to preclude our inserting it ;for, of the Jacobite muse, it may be said, as was once observed ' of her Jacobin sister-though she may have the mille ornatus, the mille decenter habet is quite another matter.'

March!-march !-pinks of election,

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Why the devil don't you march onward in order?
March!-march!-dogs of redemption,

Ere the blue bonnets come over the Border.

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